SANDWICH – Voters at several upcoming town meetings will soon weigh bans on the commercial sale of single-use plastic water bottles, as well as a new initiative to ban single-use plastics for take-out food.
Nonprofit Sustainable Practices spearheaded the bans, and Executive Director Madhavi Venkatesan said they are promoting a closed-loop system of reusable take-out packaging and utensils, instead of single-use.
“Restaurants could get a specific number of units inventory, or even get more during the day if they needed more. These would all have QR codes to be able to be tracked. They’d be dropped off at locations then they’d be picked up, cleaned and then redeployed back out,” said Venkatesan.
Towns that will consider the take-out article at their upcoming town meetings include Provincetown, Eastham, Brewster, Harwich, Falmouth, Yarmouth and Sandwich.
Venkatesan said the initiative builds on the commercial bans on the sale of single-use plastic water bottles that have already been approved by 8 towns.
“Single-use consumption comes at an extremely high price because you have all these resources at production for an item that’s going to be used just for a few minutes, but then has an extremely long afterlife that is actually toxic across its life cycle,” said Venkatesan.
For the full Sunday Journal interview with Venkatesan, click here.
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